Even though he once was a professor of constitutional law, President Obama revealed very little about his philosophy of judicial appointments during the campaign. His one widely disseminated comment, his answer to a question on the topic at the third presidential debate, revealed relatively little. Aside from the obligatory nod to his commitment to preserve Roe v. Wade (McCain made the contrary, and equally obligatory, not to his commitment to overturn it), Obama’s clearest statement focused on the judge’s sense of sympathy and fair play:

“I will look for those judges who have an outstanding judicial record, who have the intellect, and who hopefully have a sense of what real-world folks are going through. I’ll just give you one quick example. Sen. McCain and I disagreed recently when the Supreme Court made it more difficult for a woman named Lilly Ledbetter to press her claim for pay discrimination . . . [discussion of the Ledbetter case and the now passed Equal Pay Act]. I think that it’s important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will. And that’s the kind of judge that I want.”

While Obama’s statement about the judge’s approach is hardly endorsement of proactive judicial activism. He seemed to suggests that the resolution of major political issues through the courts should be truly a last resort: “[T]he court has to stand up, if nobody else will.” Those looking for a new “liberal lion,” “a Scalia of the left,” are likely to be disappointed.

But there is another side to this question, and we can see it in a most unusual op-ed piece that ran in the Washington Post two weeks ago. That J. Harvie Wilkinson, the Chief Judge of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, would write a piece in the paper to plead with the new president to use restraint in filling seats on his bench seems very, well, unjudicial. When I first saw it, I was shocked and confused about his purpose: Did he really think that this would shape Obama’s appointments? Did he expect that he could engage the public in feeling a sense of solicitude for the now somewhat beleaguered (or at least marginally less secure) conservative jurists on the nation’s most conservative circuit?

I’m still not quite sure why he wrote it, but the content of his plea is fascinating: he asked the new president to avoid the temptation to attempt an “ideological makeover” by appointing partisan voices to the courts. “Don’t send us liberal lions! Don’t send us Scalias of the left!”

Instead, Judge Wilkinson encourages the new president to make appointments who have a sense of empathy and who can relate sympathetically to the thoughts, principles, and commitments of their colleagues on the bench as well as the parties before the bar. He asks for jurists who will approach the court’s docket in the spirit of cooperation, humility, and a shared sense that both conservative-leaning and liberal-leaning judges should reject self assurance and work together to do their best for America. That, he says, is what is needed in a time of crisis when “the need for a successful presidency has seldom been so great.”

There are two ways to read Judge Wilkinson’s plea:

1) He is trying to preserve his power. Ideological hard-liners were fine with him when the ideology was his own. He never seemed to complain when Michael Luttig was sitting on the Fourth Circuit as, arguably, the most consistently conservative voice on the entire federal bench! But now, with four openings on the fifteen judge panel and a Democratic president in office, it’s time to feign a commitment to moderation to preserve his position as much as the circumstances allow. We might conclude that he is not necessarily opposed to “a polarized Fourth Circuit” when his pole was in control, but now, now, it’s time to plead for some long-overdue consensus.

2) Alternatively, we could conclude that we should read Judge Wilkinson’s view – particularly his repeated calls for the moderating influence of empathy as a means of blunting the sharp edges of judicial philosophy – as a genuine olive branch to the new president. Perhaps the last several years of virulent and bitter ideological warfare on several of the federal circuits, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, have persuaded Wilkinson (and others?) that the politicization of the courts has served neither party, nor the American people, well. There have been some earlier signs that Wilkinson was losing patience with overly politicized rulings by his own ideological allies, and he has spoken up about some of them, even in ways that undermine any possibility that he might one day be an appointment to the highest court.

I can’t say for certain what Judge Wilkinson hoped to accomplish by his article in the Washington Post, but if its message was sincerely straightforward, it is quite possible that it signals that some “conservatives” may welcome pragmatic liberal appointments to the courts. It is hard to imagine that dialing up the volume of ideological contestation can accomplish much beyond decreasing whatever claims the courts have as a voice of nonpartisan legal authority.

Some people, on both sides, may be just fine with the idea that the courts represent just another venue for partisan warfare, but there may, may, be more for Obama to gain by refusing to join the fight on those terms.